Offscreen Paris, 2023

Faces as masks as grids – Katja Stuke’s series Supernatural
»Katja Stuke’s photographic faces of high-performance female athletes from the series Supernatural take their starting point in the early 2000s. Photographed from television screens during the competition broadcasts of the Olympic Games in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), London (2012), Rio (2016), Pyeongchang (2018), they bear the technical signature of an era before our age of super high-definition. Reframed to the vertical format and rasterized through the surface of the screen, they acquire a peculiarly hybrid status between portrait and cinematographic close-up, and in their uncanny stillness pose the question of the human remnant of the image-formed face. Immersed in total concentration, clearly aware of the decisive moment of their sportswomen’s lives, these faces unfold the peculiar aura of our medial age: they are close to us and yet so far away, they are pure medial surface, grid-pattern, and as individuals behind it as hidden as behind the mesh of the fencer’s mask. In contrast to the cinema screen, the close-up is frozen here, the expressive and emotional potential of the face set to zero, in perfect mastery they have become more like machines than human – supernatural«. Florian Ebner

exhibited at:
2023 OFFTRACKS at OFFSCREEN Paris, fair
2023 »Schwarzes Licht« Donggang International Photography festival
2021 »Paris Photo Days« [G] Fiminco Foundation Paris
2018 »Questioning Photography Now« [G] GCA Chongqing
2018 »The Family of no Man« Cosmos, Rencontres d’Arles
2016 »ConteS/Xting Sport« nGbK Berlin
2015 »Katja Stuke und Flora Hitzing« Städtische Galerie Büttgen
2014 »DIE GROSSE« [G] Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
2014 »sprachen—sprachenbild« [G] Künstlervereinigung Linz
2013 »Spectator Sports« [G] Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
2012 »Zeitgespenster« [G] Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen
»Der Mensch und seine Objekte« [G] Folkwang Museum, Essen
2010 »Supernatural« Loris Berlin
2010 »Supernatural« Raum Fünf, Düsseldorf
2007 Die photographische Sammlung @ Art Cologne [G]
2003 Aenne Biermann Preis [G] Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera

»The Crown Letter Project« [G] Fondation Fiminco, Paris

2016 »ConteS/Xting Sport« nGbK Berlin

2013 Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

The portraits of artistic athletes and high divers were taken during the Olympic Games in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004), Beijing (2008) and London (2012) photographed from a television screen. The singular Olympic Games idea, the particular competition situation directly before the decisive sporting performance, the moment of concetration and the question of the identity and development of girls and women plays a key role in this photographic work. (MoCP 2013)

2018 GCA Chongqing

2018 Cosmos, Rencontres d’Arles

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